Simon Willison’s Weblog

Elasticsearch is open source, again (via) Three and a half years ago, Elastic relicensed their core products from Apache 2.0 to dual-license under the Server Side Public License (SSPL) and the new Elastic License, neither of which were OSI-compliant open source licenses. They explained this change as a reaction to AWS, who were offering a paid hosted search product that directly competed with Elastic's commercial offering.

AWS were also sponsoring an "open distribution" alternative packaging of Elasticsearch, created in 2019 in response to Elastic releasing components of their package as the "x-pack" under alternative licenses. Stephen O'Grady wrote about that at the time.

AWS subsequently forked Elasticsearch entirely, creating the OpenSearch project in April 2021.

Now Elastic have made another change: they're triple-licensing their core products, adding the OSI-complaint AGPL as the third option.

This announcement of the change from Elastic creator Shay Banon directly addresses the most obvious conclusion we can make from this:

“Changing the license was a mistake, and Elastic now backtracks from it”. We removed a lot of market confusion when we changed our license 3 years ago. And because of our actions, a lot has changed. It’s an entirely different landscape now. We aren’t living in the past. We want to build a better future for our users. It’s because we took action then, that we are in a position to take action now.

By "market confusion" I think he means the trademark disagreement (later resolved) with AWS, who no longer sell their own Elasticsearch but sell OpenSearch instead.

I'm not entirely convinced by this explanation, but if it kicks off a trend of other no-longer-open-source companies returning to the fold I'm all for it!